Apartment Houses of the Metropolis, a 1908 survey of New York’s residential buildings, describes “The Grand View” at St. Nicholas Avenue and 155th Street: “There are three apartments on a floor of eight rooms and two baths each. The parlors and libraries are finished in white enamel, dining rooms in oak, paneled and beamed ceilings. The latter two rooms have parquet floors, while all other rooms have hardwood polished flooring.” Other amenities include long-distance telephone, electric lighting and plumbing and other material of “the highest character.”

The west side of Eighth Avenue, as it was known until 1977, underneath the Ninth Avenue El (which ran above Eighth Avenue from 110-155th Streets), 1932. The El was discontinued in 1940, having been made redundant by new subway services in the Bronx and along the IND Eighth Avenue Line.

The plain style of the Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. School defies the dynamic community activism that facilitated its completion in an era of disinvestment in the city’s black and Latino neighborhoods. However, the school’s almost Brutalist style façades are typical of schools built during the postwar era, with its solid mass of red brick punctuated by narrow bands of windows on the upper stories. In the late 1960s, the city commissioned P.S. 153 to replace the aging and overcrowded P.S. 186, acquiring and clearing a tract of residential buildings. After the school was not included in the Board of Education’s austere annual budget in 1971, the locally-led National Economic Growth and Reconstruction Organization (NEGRO) staged a boycott, with staff and students relocating to temporary classrooms throughout the neighborhood until construction began on P.S. 153. Finally completed in 1975, the school was named after Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who, in 1941, was the first African-American elected to New York City Council before representing Harlem in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1945 to 1971. In 1994-95, the school constructed an addition on the site of its playground (which was relocated to the roof) to house kindergarten and first grade students.

Designed by architects Bannister & Shell and built in 1906, this church at 459 West 149th Street burned in 1963. Only a small portion of the parish house and an adjoining rectory survive.

As summer falls upon the city, New Yorkers have long-filled the public parks, pools, bike paths, tracks and stadiums to enjoy some friendly competition under the sun. These photos take you through some of the city's iconic outdoor sporting locales, from the public gymnastic rings that once drew crowds on the Hudson River, to the well-loved public pools that still scatter the city today.

West Harlem is graced with several rows of wood-frame houses, a rare sight in Manhattan, where fire codes in the 19th century halted their construction. Nos. 454-460 West 150th Street form a row of four attached wood-frame dwellings, with an asymmetrical roofline of peaked dormers and a central gable over 458-460. Now faced in green and white permastone, historic photographs indicate that these houses once boasted Queen Anne detailing and shingle façades. The group on West 150th Street originally extended to the corner of Convent Avenue and encompassed nos. 450-460, but the end structure was demolished in the early 2000s. They were designed by John Hemenway Duncan, whose notable work includes Grant’s Tomb in Manhattan and the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza.

Dunbar Apartments, March 6, 1928. The Dunbar Apartments — named for the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar — are a six-building housing development built by John D. Rockefeller between 1926-1928, in response to a housing shortage in Harlem. The buildings, designed by architect Andrew J. Thomas, were the first large-scale garden apartment complex in Manhattan, and, according to the New York Times, “the first large cooperative project in the country built for occupancy by blacks.” However, the Great Depression caused many middle class residents to default on mortgages, leading Rockefeller to foreclose on the properties in 1936. The buildings were subsequently converted to rental units. In 1970, the Dunbar Apartments were designated a New York City Landmark.

232 West 147th Street, unknown date.

(Charles F. McKim of McKim, Mead & White, 1905-06) The New York Public Library’s Hamilton Grange branch, named for the nearby home of Alexander Hamilton, was one of over 60 circulating libraries built with funds from Andrew Carnegie in the early 20th century. Charles McKim designed this Italian Renaissance-inspired, three-story, mid-block building— three characteristics typical of branch libraries during this period. The illusion created by the grading of the building’s fenestration, from the round-arch windows and door on the first floor to the five small, rectangular windows on the third floor, imbues a grand scale to this otherwise modest “palazzo.” The grandeur of the Renaissance style is also reflected in details like the first story window grills and the fleur-de-lis-patterned frieze under the dentilled cornice. The library underwent an interior modernization in 1975 and contains a collection of Spanish publications and works on African-American heritage to serve its local constituency

(Hugo Kakfa, 1885-86) In 1885 Joseph Loth & Company, a silk ribbon manufacturer, commissioned this industrial building, designed in a reversed K plan to ensure well-lit working spaces and constructed of materials that adhered to the city’s strict building codes for mills. While certain components of its design, like the narrow window bays flanked by pilasters, were typical of American mill buildings of the time, the sandstone and red brick façades also had unique ornamentation and panels to identify the firm. The building’s chimney, rising above its three stories, serves as a reminder of the coal-fired boilers that powered the factory’s looms and provided electricity. One of the few industrial enterprises in West Harlem, the mill was built at a time when the neighborhood was characterized by small farms and wood-frame houses. After the company vacated the factory in 1902, the founder’s son Bernard Loth purchased the building and converted it to partial commercial use, constructing a larger entrance on Amsterdam Avenue with cast-iron storefronts. Over the years it also housed offices for a storage company, a movie theater, a dry goods store, a firm producing theater scenery, a recording studio and a basement bowling alley. Today it is home to the New Heights Academy Charter School.

Dunbar Apartments ARCHITECT: Andrew J. Thomas DATE: 1926-28 STYLE: Apartment The Dunbar Apartments, named after the famous Black poet of the turn of the century, Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1872-1906), occupies the entire block bounded by 149th and 150th Streets and Seventh and Eighth Avenues. It was the first large cooperative built for Blacks and was Manhattan’s earliest large garden apartment complex. Financed by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and designed by the architect Andrew J. Thomas, the building was completed in 1928 and was destined, from the planning and sociological points of view, to occupy a pivotal place in the history of the Harlem community. The complex consists of six independent U-shaped buildings, containing 511 apartments, and is clustered around a large interior garden court. Eight arched entrance ways lead into the court and to public staircases. With its lawns, shrubs and trees, the garden court provides a quiet, green oasis removed from the traffic and noise of the surrounding streets. Architecturally, the dominant note is one of simplicity. The architect successfully avoided the cold monotony of many later housing projects by breaking up the massive walI surfaces. He varied the heights of the buildings from five to six stories, alternately projected and recessed adjoining units and introduced a variety of window alignments and sizes. The warm tones and varicolored brick are set off by decorative accents of limestone. Handsome wrought iron balconies and window guards and architectural terra-cotta at the roof level complete the decorative scheme.

822-888 St. Nicholas Avenue, east side, between West 153rd and 155th Streets, 1935. These four stately homes are inexplicably behind a large fence in this 1935 photograph. Upon closer inspection, the broken and open windows and the advertising on the homes themselves, indicate they are empty and deteriorating. The buildings date to at least 1899, when a real estate brochure listed them as in foreclosure. They are listed as the address of a number of residents in the first decade of the 20th century, including an officer in the Daughters of the American Revolution. It is unclear when the buildings were abandoned or demolished.

1909 Amsterdam Avenue, 1941. The debris seen here was the result of a fire on April 23,1941. The fire began in an abandoned lumberyard on the corner and given the large amounts of wood, spread quickly. A nearby wood-frame building, also empty was also destroyed. The four-alarm fire injured a number of firefighters. At some point in next two decades the buildings to the north (seen at left) which survived the fire, were knocked down for the development of the NYCHA Audubon Houses. Constructed between 1959 and 1962, the complex is referred to as a "vest pocket" public housing because it takes up less than one full city block. Designed by Greenberg and Ames, who built large apartment houses all over the city, the building is 20-stories tall and has 168 apartments.

Olympic Pool in Colonial Park (now Jackie Robinson Park), Harlem, 1939. The Colonial Park pool was one of eleven public swimming pools opened during the summer of 1936, at the direction of Robert Moses and funded by the WPA. Its opening ceremony drew 25,000 spectators.

Attached clapboard and brick buildings on West 155th Street, sharing a covered wooden porch. At left is the William McKinley Temple, a Masonic lodge built in 1925. The houses have long since been demolished. Today, the lodge is the Prince Hall Masonic Temple, named after the 18th century founder of African American Freemasonry.

North side of West 154th Street from St, Nicholas to Amsterdam Avenues, 1924. This row of seven houses (of an original 11) were constructed in 1883-1884 and designed by architect James Stroud. The Queen Anne style rowhouses have alternating models in a symmetrical order with no. 417 being the center of the grouping. No. 417 is seen at the center of this photography with the projecting gambrel gable and half timbered central pedimented dormer. These features were unique colonial style elements added to the Queen Anne buildings. George H. Putnam, head of the G. P. Putnam book publishing company, lived at no. 417 for some time around the turn of the 20th century. All of the homes are set back from the front lot line, have a stepped garden, and all are entered by a long double flight set of stairs. Today they are in various conditions, though most have not been drastically altered.

791-793 St. Nicholas Avenue, two 2 1/2-story frame houses adjoining the south west corner of 150th Street, 1932.

(Nathaniel D. Bush, 1871-72) Completed in 1872 as part of a larger effort to improve the city’s police facilities, the 32nd Police Precinct House served as the police department’s outpost in Carmansville, serving a large but sparsely populated area centered around the churches, hotel and residences adjacent to Trinity Cemetery. Officers on patrol could send telegraph messages from signal boxes to the station house, where sleeping quarters provided living space for the captain, sergeants and other officers. Nathaniel Bush, who designed numerous station houses throughout the city during his tenure as the Police Department’s architect, designed the 32nd Police Precinct House in the French Second Empire style. This symmetrical, three-story building is set under a slate mansard roof with a central tower. A two-story jail annex was constructed on West 152nd Street. Situated near the cluster of churches that once formed the core of Carmansville, the Precinct House was purchased by the nearby St. Luke African Methodist Episcopal Church (site 5) for use as its administration building.

"The New York Elevated Railroad Company built a line on Third Avenue to 129th Street at the Harlem River in 1878; a year later the company upgraded the Ninth Avenue line and extended it to 155th Street in northern Manhattan. The Gilbert (after 1878, Metropolitan) Elevated Company built and opened a line on Sixth Avenue to 58th Street in 1878, built a connection to the Ninth Avenue line on 53rd Street, and by 1880 completed a line on Second Avenue. In 1879 the companies merged to form the Manhattan Railway Company. By 1880 all four elevated lines had reached the Harlem River. Early in 1954 the New York City Transit Authority, NYCTA, which succeeded the Board of Transportation, concluded that the Third Avenue line was no longer needed south of 149th Street. Supposedly, the Lexington Avenue subway and East Side buses had adequate capacity to carry former Third Avenue riders in Manhattan. In the best interests of the city, the El would be closed and demolished. With one exception, the Third Avenue El fleet was destroyed..." For more on the Third Avenue El, check out this article by Lawrence Stelter in Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History.

418-422 West 150th Street, south side, east of Convent Avenue, ca. 1913.

The 1930s were an important moment in history of recreation in New York City. In the early 1930s the Department of Parks came under the control of Robert Moses, who had very specific goals regarding citywide access to recreation facilities year-round. Moses employed the at-the-ready manpower of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration to create a spate of new, modern, and large-scale recreational facilities. This included the construction of 11 neighborhood Olympic sized pools. The pools all opened over a few weeks during the summer of 1936. The pools and accompanying play centers were constructed of inexpensive materials but featured advanced design and technology in filtration, chlorination, and heating systems and underwater lighting. Most were rendered in sleek Art Moderne styles. Each had a wading pool, lap pool, and diving pool and could accommodate thousands of swimmers at a time. In the non-summer months both the pools and the play centers were converted for paddle tennis, shuffleboard, volleyball, basketball, handball, roller skating rinks, and dance classes. These facilities in total had a capacity for nearly 50,000 people at the same time. They changed the way New York kids spent their summers. In a 1934 press release announcing the pools Moses said, “It is no exaggeration to say that the health, happiness, efficiency and orderliness of a large number of the city's residents, especially in the summer months, are tremendously affected by the presence or absence of adequate swimming and bathing facilities.”

William McKinley Temple, data unknown. Built in 1925 for the William McKinley Lodge No. 840, today the building maintains this Masonic purpose. The Classical Revival style lodge was lost to foreclosure in 1936, though it seems that the groups continued to meet in the space for some time. From 1938 until the late 1980s, the building was occupied by the Savage School for Physical Education, a training school for physical education teachers. Today the building is the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge, a African American masonic community that was actively involved in the Civil Rights movement and continues to work on social service projects in the communities surrounding their lodges.

10 Nicholas Place at the corner of West 150th Street, as seen from St, Nicholas Avenue, 1935. Designed by Samuel Burrage Reed for famed circus producer James Bailey, the Romanesque Revival style mansion was completed in 1888. The stately home, despite being surrounded by apartment houses today and for much of the 20th century, was constructed in a still rural area. Impressive from both facades visible on the large corner plot, the house features a three-story corner tower at St. Nicolas Place and 150th Street and three smaller turrets at the other corners of the home. Supposedly the home was filled with trophies, animal skins, and other curios and artifacts from Bailey's circus travels. It also featured a number of pictorial stained glass mosaic windows. The house was so admired that Chester Wickwire got permission to build a mirror image replica in Courtland, New York . In the 1940s the home was owned by Dr. Franz Koempel, a doctor and pioneering X-ray specialist. When his widow put the house up for sale in the early 1950s, it was purchased by a local African American woman who had always admired it. The asking price: $86,000 (only $6k more than it had cost to build in 1888). She ran a funeral home on the first floor during the second half of the 20th century. In recent years it has seen a large-scale renovation. Along with its neighbors (no. 14-16 is pair of attached houses designed to look like one massive mansion), no. 10 stands newly restored, with a gleaming light colored stone facade, at a high point of the surrounding Sugar Hill neighborhood.

Washington Theatre ca. 1910 Thomas W. Lamb's (1871-1942) Washington Theatre, at 1801-1807 Amsterdam Avenue and 149th Street, was more modestly made of tapestry brick and used comic and tragic masks as keystones. Here, the proscenium painting was an eighteenth-century pastoral scene; the fireproof asbestos stage curtain displayed Washington crossing the Delaware. Today, the building serves as the Childs Memorial Temple Church of God in Christ and was the setting of Malcolm X in 1965.

Independent Subway System Station (155 Street and St. Nicholas Avenue). Phone booth, 1932. This photograph depicts the booths at 155th Street Station of the IND Eighth Avenue Line (now a local station on the C train). This station opened on September 10, 1932. Because of the tiled walls, callers had issues with echoing and reverberations from the noise outside the booth. In the IND stations opened in 1940 on the Sixth Avenue Line, similar phone booths were constructed but with sound absorbing material on the upper halves of the niche. Signage near these later booths announced, "New Sound Absorbing Booths- You Hear Clearly."

Children in Colonial Park Swimming Pool.; Harlem

79-81 St. Nicholas Place, west side, between West 153rd and 155th Streets, showing a 6-story apartment house (no. 79), 1924.